but only one wedding to organise!

Flower On The Hill

For those of you who are curious this is my flower shop! We’ve only been open 3 weeks but its all very exciting and new (and tiring. 5 o’clock starts are not good for the bride-to-be!). This is my first time working as a florist – so far so good! Excuse the temporary sign. We’ve been so busy with other things (learning flower names, how to arrange a bouquet and so on), that we kinda forgot about our sign opps! If only I had started this business a little earlier in the year then I might have been able to do my own flowers. Still we’re going to do the church flowers as my wedding florist in Suffolk was asking a lot of money to do these. Looks like a pew end, for example, will cost us about £4-5 to make ourselves as opposed to £30!

I am unable to understand why you should come into my profession with no Floristry experience, of course I wish you well but I think you are going to find it a very hard leaning curve, expensive too.

I don’t think you do the trade justice either by critising the cost of pew ends and publishing what you can make these for and of course it depends on what you are using, but there is a reason why items cost what they do as you will soon realise!

Well there are lots of reasons we set up a florist – too many to go into here but the main is that we have a greengrocers next door with a well established customer base and daily access to the markets so opening a florist in space that we already owned and to customers who have been asking for flowers makes a lot of sense to us. We realise it will be an expensive learning curve and I don’t take what I am doing lightly. I completely understand floristry is a well honed craft, one which i fully plan to immerse myself in. I am extremely excited by this business and its potential and as a very arty person myself, I think floristry and I are very well suited!

The church flowers form my florist were so expensive! And now, knowing the prices of said flowers, they seemed overly excessive to me. Whereas the prices for the bouquet and centrepieces seemed totally reasonable so we are getting the wedding florist to do those. Not trying to criticise the trade at all but in my case and maybe for other brides a bit of DIY will save them lots of money – at least there are options!

I understand your comments and whilst I can take that on board I do feel however you do a great deal of damage to those who have gone about their vocation in the proper manner.

Perhaps when you realise that to become a Florist proper takes a good 5 years, at least three of those just gaining the basic qualifications and product knowledge to be able to produce designs on your own without supervision. A further 5 years to get to your final lettered qualification at degree level if you want to take it that far.

You will know from your own experience so far rental property, business rates, lighting, insurance, staff salary etc has to be paid for otherwise you go bust in a short space of time. You are dealing with a perishable product, its not just about what something has cost you to buy in, its the expertese of the Florist to execute the design to the customers requierment/expectation/satisfaction. You don’t get a second attempt at it should it all go wrong! especially for a wedding.

My intention is not to do damage to any business or person. There are many ways of getting into different professions and as long as you have good intentions and the right attitude who says that you can’t learn? And of course its not just the cost of the flowers but I think we more than cover all those aspects too and already have many regular customers and pleased comments with bouquets we have made.

Anyway I respect your opinion and thank you for all your detailed comments!